The Department of Education has so far succeeded in declaring all homeschoolers’ high school diplomas to be invalid.
Bill Hobbs has a nice summary of what the Department has done:
Cindy Benefield, the Tennesseee Department of Education Executive Director of Field Services, who oversees the state’s homeschooling office, recently declared that a diploma from a church-related school is “not worth the paper it is written on.” That is not just the idle opinion of one uninformed bureaucrat, but has become Department policy. Bredesen’s education commissioner, Tim Webb, told four legislators in April that until the legislature passes a law stating that the diplomas given by church-related schools are acceptable, they aren’t acceptable for certain kinds of employment.
And the state is now preventing people who hold diplomas from church-related schools or home schools from holding certain jobs. For example: a police officer in Roane County, who holds a diploma from a church-related school, then graduated the police academy with perfect grades, has been demoted and prohibited from continuing to serve as a police officer – even though he also graduated from the local community college. The Rockwood police officer has been forced to take a desk job until he takes and passes the GED because the Department of Education says his 2001 diploma from a church-related school is invalid.
The fallout goes beyond that one officer. Suspects he has arrested may be set free because he can not appear as a witness in the case because the state, which regulates the profession, says his diploma is invalid.
Church-related schools (CRS) have been issuing high school diplomas since at least 1975 – and until now, they’ve always been accepted, never been challenged. The bigger irony in this is that the Tennessee university system and the Lottery scholarships continue to accept CRS diplomas. It’s a fair assumption to predict that the Department of Education would like that practice to stop as well.
Rep. Mike Bell’s bill to reverse this stunning policy change escaped the House Ed Committee without being hijacked, but it is now sitting in the Calendar & Rules Committee where it may be quietly allowed to die. If that happens, the Department will have succeeded in disenfranchising thousands of high school graduates by bureaucratic fiat. There are upwards of 40,000 homeschool students in TN. Probably 3,000 of them graduate from high school each year. The Department’s actions not only invalidate the diplomas of this year’s graduating class, they retroactively invalidate the diplomas of thousands who have graduated over the past thirty years.
What’s happening is an outrage. We have a shortage of good police officers. We have a shortage of good daycare workers – but the Department of Education can’t stand it that someone out there might be getting an education outside their control.
– Rob Shearer
Director, Schaeffer Study Center
Contending with the Culture 
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May 21, 2008 at 10:38 pm
Public school vs. private school ACT scores « Contending with the Culture
[…] So, we can now end the speculation and report with confidence that in 2007, in Tennessee, ALL students averaged a 20.7 composite ACT score, PUBLIC SCHOOL students averaged a 20.30 composite ACT score, and PRIVATE SCHOOL students averaged 21.85 composite ACT score. In other words, in 2007 private schools and home schools averaged 1.15 points higher on the ACT than the public schools. But of course, it’s the private school diplomas that the Department of Education thinks are su… […]
May 22, 2008 at 11:57 am
The Tennessee ConserVOLiance
[…] So, we can now end the speculation and report with confidence that in 2007, in Tennessee, ALL students averaged a 20.7 composite ACT score, PUBLIC SCHOOL students averaged a 20.30 composite ACT score, and PRIVATE SCHOOL students averaged 21.85 composite ACT score. In other words, in 2007 private schools and home schools averaged 1.15 points higher on the ACT than the public schools. But of course, it’s the private school diplomas that the Department of Education thinks are suspec… […]
May 22, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Gary Lima
Our two sons are home schooled. They take a national exam each year. My wife has a degree in education. My sons are doing well in home schooling because we have high standards and the curriculum we use is very high in performance standards.
I will not send my sons to a dumbed down and broken school system that spends all of its time passing failed students and prohibits an evironment of learning. If the state wants to hire dumbed down students, fine. I never planned on by boys working for the state anyway.
The NEA and state school boards need to me demoted into none existance. Their only function is social engineering our children into their own image.
May 25, 2008 at 8:43 pm
State of TN declares war on homeschoolers « nuke gingrich
[…] State of TN declares war on homeschoolers Posted on May 25, 2008 by nuke The Democrat administration of our neighbors to the north has succeeded in disenfranchising thousands of graduates of Tennessee church related schools and home-schoolers. In fact, “Cindy Benefield, the Tennesseee Department of Education Executive Director of Field Services, who oversees the state’s homeschooling office, recently declared that a diploma from a church-related school is “not worth the paper it is written on.” That is not just the idle opinion of one uninformed bureaucrat, but has become Department policy. Bredesen’s education commissioner, Tim Webb, told four legislators in April that until the legislature passes a law stating that the diplomas given by church-related schools are acceptable, they aren’t acceptable for certain kinds of employment.” source […]
May 15, 2009 at 11:27 pm
W. R. Robertson
I really do not understand what has been said about the home-school diploma being worthless. I mean, the police officer being demoted to a desk job until he gets his GED is ludicrous. He went to college which by the way you need a diploma to get in. Secondly, he went to police academy. The way I see it, if he went to college and to the police academy on top of his home-schooling, then it sounds to me that his college education and academy education are worthless as well.